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What’s the most difficult question you’ve been asked as a maintenance instructor?
Blye Widmar
"Where are the prints?!"
This was the final question in an onslaught of verbal feedback, comments, and critiques I received from my students back in 2019. I had two years of instructor experience and was teaching a class that had been meticulously rehearsed in preparation for an accreditation visit. I knew the training material well and transferred that knowledge effectively enough for all the students to pass the class. As we wrapped up, I asked the students how they felt about my first big system-level class, and they did not hold back.
“Why was the exam from memory when we don’t work from memory in the plant?” “Why didn’t we refer to the vendor documents?” “Why didn’t we practice more on the mock-up?” And so on.
Anne M. Adamczyk, John W. Norbury
Nuclear Technology | Volume 175 | Number 1 | July 2011 | Pages 216-227
Technical Paper | Special Issue on the 16th Biennial Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division / Radiation Transport and Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT11-A12293
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
It is important that accurate estimates of crew exposure to radiation are obtained for future long-term space missions. Presently, several space radiation transport codes, all of which take as input particle interaction cross sections that describe the nuclear interactions between the particles and the shielding material, exist to predict the radiation environment. The space radiation transport code HZETRN uses the nuclear fragmentation model NUCFRG2 to calculate electromagnetic dissociation (EMD) cross sections. Currently, NUCFRG2 employs energy-independent branching ratios to calculate these cross sections. Using Weisskopf-Ewing (WE) theory to calculate branching ratios for compound nucleus reactions, however, is more advantageous than the method currently employed in NUCFRG2. The WE theory can calculate not only neutron and proton emission, as in the energy-independent branching ratio formalism used in NUCFRG2, but also deuteron, triton, helion, and alpha-particle emission. These particles can contribute significantly to total exposure estimates. In this work, photonuclear cross sections are calculated using WE theory and the energy-independent branching ratios used in NUCFRG2 and then compared to experimental data. It is found that the WE theory gives comparable but mainly better agreement with data than the energy-independent branching ratio. Furthermore, EMD cross sections for single neutron removal are calculated using WE theory and an energy-independent branching ratio used in NUCFRG2 and compared to experimental data.
